1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to messaging systems, and more particularly, to supporting multiple message formats in a single user interface.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a 24×7 international business environment, electronic messaging provides a convenient way for companies to communicate with customers all over the globe. Currently, many companies have dedicated e-mail inboxes defined for specific business areas. Often, employees called agents are assigned to poll and manage the support requests from customers for one or more dedicated e-mail inboxes, as well as from their individual agent inboxes. With customer support centers handling very large numbers of customer support requests daily, increasing the efficiency of each agent in responding to each customer request by only seconds can produce enormous cost savings for the customer support center.
To provide international support, companies must be able to communicate with customers using a variety of electronic messaging systems, languages, and formats. Even within a single messaging system, messages can be sent and received having many different formats. For example, common electronic mail formats include plain text, rich text, and hypertext markup language (HTML). In addition, a message may be communicated in one language, such as Japanese, requiring a different character set for display than the default configuration for the recipient, who may, for example, use English as a default language. Preserving the original format of a message can be valuable in formulating a response to the message.
If a company wishes to implement a customer support center where agents can communicate using multiple messaging systems, typically the company must purchase different software products to handle each messaging system because of the different communication protocols involved. Because different products must be purchased, agents must learn to use a different user interface for each messaging system. Efficiency of an agent typically degrades when he or she must remember different user interfaces for communicating with customers via different messaging systems.
Thus, it is desirable to enable customer service agents to communicate with customers in a variety of electronic message formats from within a single user interface.